When the Lights Go Out(31)
It took nearly thirty minutes to get to the obstetrician appointment, and all along the way, all I could hear was the grinding of snow beneath the tires’ tread. Outside it was cold, a frosty thirty-two degrees, and the plump clouds looked like they might burst apart at the seams at any moment, burying us with three more inches of snow. Aaron was torn, worried we wouldn’t be home in time for his shift, but feeling the need to go too. To be at the appointment. He vacillated about it for a good five or ten minutes, standing in the open doorway, letting the cold air into our home.
In the end, he decided to go so that as we drove south on Highway 42, both of us quiet, I felt a great guilt about it, knowing that if he was late to work, it would be my fault.
The obstetrician was in Sturgeon Bay, a seventeen-mile drive. He was the closest I could find and also came with a recommendation, one from Miranda, the only woman in town I knew well enough to ask. Miranda, who drove her three boys to my home last week in her Dodge Caravan—windshield caked with ice crystals still, so that it was near impossible to see through the rimy glass—because it was far too cold to walk.
Miranda, who sat sprawled on my sofa, feet raised to the coffee table, while I rocked her crying two-month-old baby, Carter, to sleep.
Miranda, who was so overwhelmed with motherhood that she couldn’t stand to be alone with her own three kids.
Miranda, who revealed to me that she was pregnant again, that it was a mistake this time, that they hadn’t been trying. “Because who in their right mind tries for more when they already have three kids?” she asked, staring at me sadly as if I should take pity on her for this obvious misfortune, but what I felt instead was infuriated and sick, anger and bile rising quickly inside me.
Miranda confessed to me that though she and Joe had waited the recommended six weeks after Carter was born to fool around, sure enough, Joe managed to knock her up on the first try, and already the morning sickness had set in so that her boys were forced to watch even more TV than ever before because Miranda didn’t have the stamina to entertain them all day, let alone feed them. “The nerve of that bastard,” she said of Joe and his evident virility, and then she asked what in the world was taking Aaron and me so long to conceive.
“You don’t think,” she asked, eyes wide, “that you’re infertile, do you? That that handsome husband of yours is shooting blanks?”
As I sat beside him in the car, driving to the obstetrician appointment, listening to the pulverization of snow beneath the wheels, staring at the clouds, I couldn’t help but wonder if that was the case. Was Aaron shooting blanks? Was Aaron infertile?
Aaron, who could do anything, who could fix anything, could not create a child?
Aaron, to whom everything came so easily, had difficulty making a baby?
The thought alone made me angry and annoyed. Angry at Aaron because why, for all the things he was so capable of doing, was he incapable of doing this?
Why couldn’t he fix this? Why couldn’t he make this right?
Assigning fault seemed to be the name of the game these days, pointing fingers, attaching blame. Whose fault was it that we didn’t yet have a baby?
March 11, 1997 Egg Harbor
What I’ve come to learn after being referred to a fertility specialist is that even though I get my period each month with moderate regularity, my body isn’t ovulating correctly, isn’t always ovulating. Anovulation, it’s called, a word I’ve never heard of before but now think about at every waking hour and when I should be asleep. If I’m being honest, this comes as little surprise to me. My body is simply going through the motions, the preparations of the endometrium—the lining of my uterus readying itself to welcome a fertilized egg—and then sloughing off when no egg moves in. It’s not that the egg wasn’t fertilized by Aaron’s sperm. It’s that it simply wasn’t there to begin with.
Today I began my third cycle of Clomid. After months of this, I have no sense of humility left, no modesty. I’ve paraded my private parts for every doctor, nurse and technician in the fertility clinic to see, while all Aaron ever had to do was drop off a sperm sample and endure a simple blood draw. It hardly seems fair. The first month I didn’t ovulate. Last month we upped the dosage and, though Dr. Landry spied two follicles when he performed his ultrasound—forcing the transvaginal ultrasound probe between my legs so that I should rightfully have felt violated and ashamed, but no longer did, sending Aaron and me home with strict orders to have sex—we didn’t get pregnant.
The pills make me weepy all the time, for no apparent reason at all, though having seen the inventory of potential side effects, I consider it a blessing that the only one I’m doomed to endure is the predisposition for crying. I cry at the market; I cry in the car. I cry at home while mopping floors and folding laundry and standing in the doorway to one of the spare bedrooms, wondering if it will ever hold a child, steeling myself for another cycle of Clomid that will likely end again with my monthly flow.
To counter Aaron’s low sperm motility, as it’s called, he’s switched to wearing loose-fitting underpants (I don’t tell Miranda this), and is tasked with finding ways to reduce stress in his life, stress which neither of us knew he had. He now sleeps until after ten o’clock every morning so that we no longer share our day’s coffee on the dock, which is fine anyway seeing as the eternal winter has trapped us indoors and there are no sailboats to be seen on the bay, none until spring. He takes herbal supplements and when the temperatures aren’t too abysmal will go for a walk or a run, so that our days together are mere hours at best. This too is fine, seeing as we don’t have much to talk about anymore, nothing that doesn’t involve the many things the world is reluctant to let us have: strong, capable sperm; regular ovulation; a positive pregnancy test; a baby.